Washington’s Best-Kept Secret in Africa

Washington’s Best-Kept Secret in Africa

In November 2015, Nick Turse, managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute published his essay “The US’s Military Best-Kept Secret” that still raises eyebrows.

Turse has reported from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa. His pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse’s New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam received a 2014 American Book Award.

For years, the US military expansion in Africa has gone unnoticed thanks to a deliberate effort to keep the public misinformed.

In the shadows of what was once called the “Dark Continent,” very little has been heard about it … by deliberate choice. But look hard enough and –north to south, east to west– you’ll find the reasons for that silencing effort: in remote locales, behind fences and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, the US military has built an extensive archipelago of African outposts, transforming the continent, experts say, into a laboratory for a new kind of war.

So, how many US military bases are there in Africa? It’s a simple question with a simple answer. For years, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America’s only acknowledged “base” on the continent. It wasn’t true, of course, because there were camps, compounds, installations, and facilities elsewhere, but the military leaned hard on semantics to impose its logic.

Take a look at the Pentagon’s official list of bases, however, and the number grows. The 2015 report on the Department of Defense’s global property portfolio lists Camp Lemonnier and three other deep-rooted sites on or near the continent.

For years, various reporters have shed light on hush-hush outposts ––most of them built, upgraded, or expanded since 9/11– dotting the continent, including so-called cooperative security locations (CSLs). Earlier this year, AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez disclosed that there were actually 11 such sites.

Research by TomDispatch indicates that in recent years the US military has, in fact, developed a remarkably extensive network of more than 60 outposts and access points in Africa. Some are currently being utilized, some are held in reserve, and some may be shuttered. These bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can be found in at least 34 countries –more than 60 percent of the nations on the continent– many of them publicly classified by Washington as corrupt, repressive states with poor human rights records.

The United States also operates “Offices of Security Cooperation and Defense Attaché Offices in approximately 38 [African] nations,” according to Falvo, and has struck close to 30 agreements to use international airports in Africa as refueling centers.

When AFRICOM became an independent command in 2008, Camp Lemonnier was reportedly still one of the few American outposts on the continent. In the years since, the United States has embarked on nothing short of a building boom. As a result, it’s now able to carry out increasing numbers of overt and covert operations, from training exercises to drone assassinations.

“AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces,” says Richard Reeve, the director of the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group, a London-based think tank. “Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops, equipment, or even aircraft. There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases…so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary.”

Such a thought experiment, he suggests, could offer clues to what the future might hold now that the continent is dotted with American outposts, drone bases, and compounds for elite teams of Special Operations forces. “I think,” Reeve says, “that we could be looking at something a bit scarier in Africa.”

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